Help:Recent changes patrol
Users that have been granted administrator or rollback rights may take part in the Recent changes patrol. The patrol is a way to show that each edit has been checked to make sure it conforms to the policies of this wiki. It also prevents a duplication of effort by clearly indicating which edits have and have not been checked. Edits that have not been checked will be preceded by a red exclamation mark on the page. Approval of an edit is granted by clicking on "as patrolled" or "this page as patrolled". The difference between the two function is explained below. On the page, there is an option to hide the patrolled edits so that only the edits that have not yet been checked will be displayed. It is located at in the "Recent changes options" box at the top of the page. Edits made by users with the rights listed above are automatically marked as patrolled. For advice on what to look for when patrolling changes, refer to the . Web browser differences When a page is marked as patrolled, a status message is displayed with an option to return to the Recent Changes page. At the moment, it is not possible to mark a range of edits as approved. Each one must be checked separately. If several edits in a row need to be checked, it is helpful to use a web browser with tabbed browsing support, such as Opera, Firefox or Internet Explorer v7 or higher. This allows the status message to be sent to a separate tab, and continuing forward or back through the differences of a page. Similarly, if the web browser has the option to create background tabs, each revision can be approved with the status message going into a background tab that can be closed after all edits have been checked. Opening a link in a background tab: * Firefox: Hold down the CTRL key and click on the link. * Opera: Right-click on the link and select "Open in background tab". * Safari: If "Ctrl-click opens a link in a new tab" is selected in your Preferences, hold down the CTRL key and click on the link. If it is not selected, hold down the CTRL and ALT keys, then click on the link. Filtering out patrolled edits When looking at the list, edits that have not yet been checked are shown with an exclamation mark next to the timestamp. It may be helpful to filter out the edits that have been patrolled. You can do so by going to the "Recent changes options" near the top of the page and clicking on "Hide patrolled edits". Another method of filtering the unpatrolled is to use the "Namespace" drop-down menu to select which type of edits to view. Click on the box next to the namespace(s) you want to remove from the Recent Changes, then click on the "Go" button to update the list. For example, if you are not an administrator and did not want to look at any changes to the MediaWiki pages, you would deselect the "MediaWiki" and "MediaWiki talk" option. Maximum number of changes The Recent changes page will only show a certain amount of edits. The maximum appears to be 5,000 unpatrolled edits for up to one year. The exact number for both varies from wiki to wiki, depending on how active the wiki is. For example, changing it with the "Recent changes options" (or manually updating the settings in the address bar of your browser) to display 365 days and 9000 changes may only display edits from the past few months instead of the entire year. You can still see unpatrolled edits on individual pages by navigating through the history of the page. Due to these limitations, members of the Recent changes patrol are encouraged to patrol the edits regularly and not allow a backlog of un-checked edits to build up. Patrolling a single edit From the Recent Changes page, click on the "diff" link to see the comparison of the page before and after the edit. If the edit is acceptable, click on "as patrolled". If it is not acceptable, leave it as unpatrolled, then fix the edit. Patrolling a series of edits The "as patrolled" command only appears when displaying the difference between two pages. When more than one edit needs be checked, make a note of the timestamp of the first edit, then click on the "hist" link to display the history of the page. After the Revision history is displayed, click on the timestamp immediately prior to the edit to be checked. Next, click on the "(diff)" link at the top of the page to the right of "Newer revision →". The differences will then be displayed with the "as patrolled" command. As noted under "Web browser differences", it is helpful to divert the status message into a separate tab when clicking on "as patrolled". This will allow you to click on "Newer edit →" to review the rest of the edits. Patrolling a new page For newly-created pages that have not had any further edits, click on the page name. The page can be approved by clicking on "this page as patrolled" in the lower-right corner. If the page is not acceptable, either fix the problem or edit it to add to signal to an administrator that the page needs to be deleted. :Note: When viewing newly-created pages on the page, unpatrolled pages are highlighted in yellow. For newly-created pages with later edits, you will first need to click on the time stamp of when the page was created. The "this page as patrolled" is displayed, along with "Newer revision → (diff)" at the top. Edits can then be checked the same as described in the "Patrolling a series of edits" section above. Blogs Blog posts can be marked as patrolled using the same procedure as a newly-created page. At this time, comments in a blog cannot be marked as patrolled. Each comment must be individually checked. For comments that are approved, no action needs to be taken. The comment will continue to show as unpatrolled in the Recent changes list, however. Comments that do not meet the wiki's standards will need to be edited or deleted. When editing a comment, keep in mind that you are altering what that person said. Use care to remove only the part that does not meet standards. If the entire comment needs to be deleted, add the template at the top of the comment to alert an administrator. Message Walls When looking at a group of messages in the Recent Changes list for a user on their Message Wall, individual messages can be marked as patrolled by clicking on the time stamp of the message. The message will then open separate from the rest of the group with the "Mark as patrolled" option. Logs and help The will display all pages that have been patrolled. By default, the Patrol log is not included when viewing . ---- ---- The information below is automatically included from Wikia Help. Recent changes patrol